Looking for Alaska

by John Green

but you don’t

need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: You’ve already got a mom.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets

dragged out to sea by the undertow—that, in short, we are all going.

How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?

“Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life

has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze,

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.

He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who

would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.

here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.

I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.

When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.